Just over a year ago I was out with my father two and a half drink in and beginning to relax into my own skin in a pub filled to the rafters with my parents piers bopping to a cover of Bob Dylan’s anthem Wagon Wheel. I’d craftily ducked the “so what are you up to nowadays?” question several times with a couple of ‘living the dream’-esc vague platitudes. So when a larger gent who I did know so well buckled up to fill some silence I figured I’d give it a go. “I make music” I gleefully replied. As this is true and I enjoy it greatly. “Yeah but besides that, cant do that forever”. This was a revelation I as not ready for. Not by any-means that I could not indulge myself creative exploration for the rest of my life. But rather that a perfect stranger would so openly declare my aspirations a joke.

Its been 18 months and countless hours of un-payed work since my graduation. I’m starting to feel like the victim of conditioning. Hours upon hours of advice so many incentives and schemes that I’ve lost any understanding of why I started my degree. I know that once upon a time it was enough to work payed or un-payed. As long as my head was above water then learning day by day moving from project to project was a victory. There was a playfulness to it. Even while I ground through the most mundane of chores. Filling out applications, researching funding avenues, structuring portfolios and CV’s. They where steps along the way to something.

I now understand the disappointment that followed to be a product of entitlement. I was not so self deluded as to think the conclusion of my Music production degree would leave me inundated with offers. I new a chose the hard road. What I didn’t expect is the resentment I was to be a target of.

Entitlement is a dirty word now there is no getting away from it. Whether your facing a mistreated civil servant, a employer that just cashed in a free shift or smiling recruitment agent in a shiny suit. That which once protected the rights that people fought so hard to secure is being dangled over our heads like so much first-world guilt.

Its difficult to imagine how the relatively new idea of all powerful growth will be matched by a culture of always posing the alternatives as a reason to not be dishearten. Our options are not progressive and leave little in the way of hope for personal growth. Call centre work beckons forth the young. The caring profession welcomes back the damaged. The lucky find there place in a bar, cafe or the loving arms of American Express. These are the trials of are young as they consult with their shackled spirit guides.

Homeland‘s abused protagonist Nicholas Brody has become a useful archetype for failure. As they bat and balled his mental heath across the pacific he emotes at the pace of his captors. Hands outstretched towards whatever goal promises the little peace he found before he began lessening.

If the comparison seems harsh and a little like a conspiracy that’s because before conspiracy became associated grandiose sudo-socail-science it would have been considered an apt description of what the un/under-employed face on a day to day bases. It does not encourage growth to so loudly begrudge young people support as they attempt to re-build there professions from the ground up. Let alone to presser them into submission and the reluctant acceptance of a cynical world that promises so much and delivers so little.